Contribution of CIRP to the development of metrology and surface quality evaluation during the last fifty years

An overview of the contribution of the members of the C.I.R.P. community to the progress of Metrology and Surface Roughness Quality Evaluation is given. The following items are included in the part on metrology: brief overview of the existing situation before 1950, contribution to the successive definitions of the unit of length and related reference length standards, traceability, preliminary work to standardization, thermal effects, design and construction of precision machine tools and measuring machines, CMM, large scale metrology. In the field of surface quality evaluation, the following items are reviewed: reference profiles and related definitions of parameters, filtering, surface and subsurface integrity, functional meaning of parameters, instrumentation, scanning probe microscopy, 3D surface evaluation. A comprehensive list of references is provided.